Meanwhile, multiple comas are a poor prognostic indicator.
I don’t have any trouble keeping them straight myself, but this mnemonic is hilariously useless to me (no offense 
). Leaning forward or backwards totally depends on which way they’re facing. The backslash is a thin little man facing left (towards the Qwerty row), leaning forward, whereas the forward slash is facing right towards the shift key – and also leaning forward.
Now of course if either one of them is standing on their head, the whole thing’s reversed.
I’m guessing the confusion there in using “backslash” instead of “slash” or “forward slash” comes with familiarity with DOS/Microsoft conventions which use backslashes as the directory/path delimiters. I remember using backslashes all over the place back in the mid-90s navigating command line directories (although I believe the current command line is slash agnostic and has been for awhile and accepts both forward and backward slashes as path delimiters, but it’s been a decade and a half since I’ve use a Windows box.) So back then, when you told someone to navigate to a directory, you would say: “Okay, go to PROGRAMS backslash GAMES backslash DOOM” or something like that. It was heard a lot in that context.
According to “The Unicode Standard, Version 14.0”,
/ = SOLIDUS
\ = REVERSE SOLIDUS
So, I’ve checked with my kids and nephew. Most had never heard of this, and one thought it was just a typo. They are in their late teens and early twenties.
Oh sure, both slashes are leaning forwards in one direction or the other. But there are two assumptions that make my mnemonic sensible:
- the way we write/type in English is left-to-right
- gravity works downwards, so ‘leaning’ is about the top of the object with respect to the bottom
With those two axioms in mind, there is only sensible way to depict something as ‘leaning forward’ … /
Multiple commas indicate a commatose condition.
Seriously, the only times I’ve used multiple commas is to indicate consecutive omitted positional parameters somewhere or in a Comma-Separated Values file.
Comma, comma, comma, comma-come comma…Yay, yay, yeah…
You answered your own question.
Commas were a delay feature in the “olden days” of dial up internet modem speed dial. I suspect it’s a bit of a holdover from that era.
Except that it seems to be a new writing feature, not an old one.
I’ve seen it used for quite a while, texts, emails etc. More or less to signify drawing attention to a pause or gap in thought. Kind of a “pregnant pause” concept.
“Quite a while” as in since dial-up modem times? I’ve only seen it recently. It’s a young person thing generally.
Not that new IMHO. But then I asked a 20something office admin person what “cc” meant on the letter she just typed on the computer and she said “carbon copy”. I asked her if she knew what that meant. After a bit of a pause she admitted she really didn’t and in fact after more discussion she had never seen carbon paper before. Yet the term is still in use.
As is “blue print”. But I’m from dial up modem era, and I would never think to use multiple commas to indicate pauses in writing, why would a young person use it when they have no exposure to dial up modems? There is a more reasonable explanation above, that it is seen as a softer form of “…” by some of the younger generation.
I would use commas for the appropriate pauses required for the speed dial, dial up number for the dial up modem back in the day.
But you never used them in conversation, right? That’s what we’re discussing. I don’t think your etymology is the right one.
No, not in “conversation” as such, but I’ve seen commas used to emphasize a pause and just sharing my theory as to where the concept may have come from at least in some cases.
I’ve no idea where I got this from, but I’ve long thought “CC” for E-mail meant “Courtesy Copy”.
I thought the “cc” just indicated copies (plural), like “pp.” means “pages” as in “pp. 32-39”.